Word: dreifus
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
When Joanna Dreifus '94, a fine arts concentrator, approached Fogg director James Cuno last year about a summer job, Cuno suggested she might be interested in working on an exhibition about the society. "They were planning to have this exhibition, which was going to be small...enough to be manageable for me," Dreifus explains. "And also the subject matter of it--an undergraduate organization that exhibited modern art in the early 1930s--[he felt] it would be appropriate for an undergraduate to be working...
...plan the exhibition, Dreifus first had to "just kind of get general information about what the society was." Nicholas Fox Weber's Patron Saints: Five Rebels Who Opened America to a New Art, 1928-1943 provided much of the necessary background. "[The book] is about these Harvard undergraduates that...paved the way for a greater appreciation of modern art," Dreifus says. "Then from there, I looked in the archives of the Fogg. They had a lot of documentary materials from the society that were just tucked away in these folders that hadn't been opened in 60 years...
...course of her research, Dreifus discovered just how extraordinary the members of the Society were. She says, "Lincoln Kirstein, who was one of the original founders, would write on the...catalogs that they produced for each exhibition--he would write these very bold and brash statements [saying] modern art today means this and that. These were all very bold things for an undergraduate to be doing, but for [the society]--it was just in them to do it. It's not something many people do today...
...Dreifus describes how the group operated: "It was...a small group that did everything themselves. They rented out two rooms at the Coop...They arranged to borrow the works of art, they hung them up, they were even the security guards during the exhibitions--they would sit there with their homework on their laps. It was entirely student...
...student-run organization, it was very well-connected. Not only were members of the Society able to borrow works from collections like that of Mrs. John D. Rockefeller, members were "even friendly with the artists themselves," Dreifus says. "For example, Alexander Calder, the wire sculptor, had a solo exhibition for the Harvard Society. They invited him to Harvard to construct everything here and exhibit it. And he stayed with Eddie Warburg, who was one of the men in the society. He stayed in his room in Holworthy and...constructed everything there...